PearShaped
by RainneCassidy
Summary: Crazy people do unpredictable things, and NCIS seems to be staffed entirely by crazy people.  A reworking of 1x16 "Bête Noire."  Teamfic.


Ari Haswari has a mission. He must infiltrate a secure building which houses one of the United States government's armed federal agencies, retrieve a body if possible, and retrieve a crucial piece of evidence which could be used to prove that Hamas, a Middle Eastern terrorist organization, was planning to infect an entire naval installation with a smallpox virus.

Nothing to it, thinks Ari Haswari.

He has help; his handler (and half-sister) Ziva arranges to have him transported into the morgue of this small law enforcement agency, where he will unfortunately be required to hold hostage as many people as he can get in front of his gun until he retrieves his target materials, at which time he will demand a hostage negotiator, throw a flashbang grenade, possibly shoot at a wall, and escape in the confusion.

Nothing to it. With any luck, he'll be at his safe house in time to catch _The Weakest Link_.

He has dossiers on everyone he might encounter; there are several teams of agents working out of the Washington Field Office of NCIS, and any number of collateral personnel: the medical examiner, his assistant, the forensic lab technicians, secretaries, the list goes on but Ari does not. It's hot in the body bag, and he's got a trickle of sweat running down the side of his face. He wishes he dared move to wipe it, but he cannot be entirely certain that he is alone, even though he's fairly certain that he is.

The heat makes him drowsy; he relaxes enough to doze, but does not allow himself to fall too deeply asleep, as he must be alert the moment he knows the body bag is about to be opened. That is when his mission will begin.

Ari's mission should be simple to complete. With any luck at all, the evidence he needs will still be in the morgue with Qassam's body, and he will be out of this building before noon.

Ari hears doors open beyond the small room he is in; he hears men speaking. One of them sounds British; the other one has a deep, American voice. He hears them say each other's names. The British man is Dr. Mallard; the American is Gerald. Gerald retrieves Ari from the holding room and Ari relaxes completely as he is hoisted in his body bag from the gurney he lies upon to an autopsy table. The bag is unzipped, and Ari's mission begins. And, though he does not know it, Ari's luck runs out.

It starts going badly when he realizes that the doctor he is holding hostage is old enough to be his grandfather – and actually reminds him somewhat of the man, his mother's beloved Abba. He can hear his grandfather's voice in his mind, asking him what he means by such disrespect. He almost barks at the foolish voice to shut up, but he can't quite bring himself to do so. Instead, he calmly (and internally) explains to his grandfather that he is doing what he must do to prevent more loss of life. The voice of Basim Haswari is unimpressed.

It gets worse when Ari learns that the evidence he needs has been taken away to a laboratory upstairs to be analyzed. After the telephone conversation with the forensic analyst – the one who, according to her dossier, makes herself up to look like a corpse and has an obsession with death but who, according to her coworkers, has a phobia of autopsy – Ari is convinced that NCIS is staffed by crazy people. This could be very bad; crazy people do unpredictable things.

Like, for example, sending an agent down in place of a lab rat and blowing his plans all to hell.

Kate Todd has a mission, too. Her mission is to prevent and solve crimes that threaten the warfighting capability of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, and she straps on that mission every day with her badge and her gun. She has help in that mission – it's not just hers, but the mission of the whole NCIS and everyone who works there – and she is proud to be a member of what is widely considered to be the best team that NCIS has. She has been a student of Jethro Gibbs for a little over a year now, is just out of probationary agent status, and likes to think that she's a better investigator now than she was just a year ago.

She is starting to take everything more seriously now, even the lighter things, so when Abby comes to her with a wild story about a fear of autopsy, she laughs for a moment and then puts on her serious face. It strikes an odd chord with her that Ducky should be doing an infectious autopsy on a body whose bloodwork has yet to be done, and so she calls to query the good doctor about the subject.

"Ducky," she asks him, "what's going on with the –"

"I knew you could do it," he interrupts her, his voice warm on the top but frozen solid underneath.

"What?" she asks him, her brow rising in confusion.

"See you in ten minutes, Abby," he says, and he hangs up.

Abby? She doesn't sound a thing like Abby, not even over the telephone. Plus, he had to have seen her extension on the telephone screen. Why on Earth would he think she was Abby?

She begins to mull it over in her mind. Something is wrong here – very wrong. Ducky is demanding evidence be returned to Autopsy when there is nothing he can do with it; Ducky is doing an infectious autopsy on a body he has no way of knowing is infectious; Ducky addressed Kate as Abby when he had to have known full well who he was talking to.

She is still standing at her desk, one hand on the evidence box, mulling things over, when Gibbs walks up to her. "Whatcha got there?" he asks her.

"Evidence," she replies, distracted by her thoughts. She is trying to piece things together in her mind, but the pieces not only don't fit, they seem to have all come from different puzzles.

"Well, I can see that, Kate," Gibbs replies in that tone of exasperation that he seems to use with her quite often – usually when she's being particularly thick or obtuse. Or both. "What evidence is it?"

"That terrorist," she replies, still distracted and feeling sure that she is missing some crucial thing that would make everything fall into place. "The one from Little Creek."

He raises an eyebrow. "Okay, and why is it on your desk instead of in Abby's lab?"

"Abby asked me to take it down to Ducky; he wants it all back for some reason and she's afraid to go down to Autopsy. But, Gibbs, something's not right, and I can't put my finger on what it is."

He studies her for a moment, and then says, "Tell me."

So she does. She tells him everything Abby told her, and she tells him about the unusual phone call, and she tells him about Ducky calling her Abby. And when she's done, she says, "I know something's not right, I just can't put my finger on what it is."

McGee chooses that moment to walk up, and Gibbs has him punch up the security camera from Autopsy onto the plasma screen. It comes up as snow. The security camera isn't feeding. They roll back the footage to just before the camera went down, and they watch Gerald open a body bag and then stand there, staring into it. They watch Ducky come to Gerald's side and also stand there, staring into the body bag. Then they watch the muzzle of a gun slide out of the body bag, point at the camera, and fire. The footage goes to snow.

Kate's phone rings. She picks it up; it's Abby. Ducky has called her again, and he's getting agitated about the evidence. He wants it STAT, as in five minutes ago, Kate, and what's the holdup because Abby doesn't like it when Ducky yells at her; it reminds her very strongly of being yelled at by her grandfather for tracking up the house or supergluing her brother's head to a hardhat or that time she accidentally fell in the hallway and knocked over the little table that held her grandmother's favorite crystal candelabra and it shattered into a million pieces and –

Kate interrupts Abby's diatribe to deliver Gibbs's order to 'get up here now,' and she hangs up in time to hear Gibbs call the director and advise him that there may be a hostage situation in Autopsy, and then Abby arrives and they all go up to MTAC. Their mission is now quite simple: rescue Ducky and Gerald and capture or kill whoever is in there with them.

Within half an hour, Gibbs is on the floor where Abby's gas chromatograph was, sliding a flexible video probe through a hole he has made in the floor. He is able to get one good look around – one terrorist, two hostages – before he is caught and the terrorist shoots out his camera.

Well, if this doesn't just bugger all.

It's not even noon and he's already been made. Ziva is going to have a lot of things to say about this, and she's got a way about her of speaking that reminds him of the way she used to make her displeasure known when she was a child. Ziva had a very piercing voice when she was a child. Of course, Ziva will have the right to say a lot of things about this; it's Ziva's ass if he fucks this up.

After shooting out the little camera that was fed in from upstairs, Ari begins to run his secondary plan through his mind. Demand the evidence from the hostage negotiator, change into riot gear, toss the flashbang, shoot out the light, and try to get the hell out of there without getting killed.

What was it he had been thinking only a few hours ago? Nothing to it? Serves you right, Haswari, for getting cocky. Sure of yourself weren't you, a few hours ago, with no company but your gun and the sweltering interior of a body bag? Are you still feeling so sure of yourself? Let's check: ah. Looks like a No.

He's never going to get out of here with Qassam's body, but that's all right; he's pretty sure Qassam hadn't infected himself yet. If he can just get the evidence and the smallpox sample, he can still salvage this mission and hopefully stave off whatever very high-frequency tantrum Ziva might throw.

When the hostage negotiator calls, he repeats his demand for the box of evidence. He is asked to release one of his hostages as a good faith gesture. He replies in his most reasonable tone that they should take it as a gesture of faith that he has not harmed either of his hostages yet.

This is not going at all as he had planned. These people are completely crazy, and he blames the forensic scientist for all of this. If she had just brought the evidence down as he had requested, he would be out of here by now. He spends a few minutes uncharitably wishing horrible fates upon the heads of death-obsessed scientists with unreasonable fears of places they are supposed to go on a regular basis. He spends another few minutes contemplating the idea of shooting Gerald to make himself feel better. He never even entertains the idea of shooting Dr. Mallard; his grandfather would haunt him. He makes it a policy not to do things which might induce Basim Haswari to visit him from beyond the grave.

They understand everything when Abby finds the smallpox virus in the nasal spray.

All the evidence goes in the box, less the nasal spray, which they replace from the base pharmacy. Gibbs puts a Kevlar vest under his polo shirt. He calls down to Autopsy receiving and has Axelrod move the ambulance right up against the outside doors, so that they will not open. He stations Tony and Pacci in the stairwell. He takes the elevator down to the basement.

When the elevator doors open, Kate and Balboa press themselves against the wall to his left so that they are not visible from inside the morgue. He steps out, carrying the evidence box, and the doors almost close behind him. Balboa slips a small chock into the door at the last moment.

The air is very tense.

This man is entering the room, unarmed, carrying the box Ari wants. He carries himself as a man who is unafraid, and Ari thinks to himself that perhaps this man is, in fact, unafraid. A crazy man would not be afraid in a situation like this, and Ari is fairly sure that everyone who works at NCIS is crazy.

They talk. This man, this Agent Gibbs, taunts Ari with the knowledge that his mission has failed utterly. NCIS knows about the smallpox; NCIS undoubtedly by now knows who Qassam was and who he worked for. Hell, by now, NCIS may even know his own name and who he works for. Who he really works for, not just who he is undercover with. These people are better than he was led to believe.

He runs over all the potential scenarios in his mind. He cannot find a way out other than the one chance he has. He raises his gun and fires; he throws the flashbang grenade. He waits a moment to see if the hostage rescue team will pour into the room; no one comes. Surely this man, who now lays on the floor (hopefully) dead, did not come down here alone.

He makes his way through the smoke to the back door that he came in through; it opens perhaps three inches before banging against the sidewall of a large vehicle. He's not getting out that way.

There is a stairwell and an elevator. He turns, unsure which to choose, deciding on the elevator as his best bet. He reaches for the button. In the smoke, he misses that the doors are slightly open.

The doors slide open all the way, and he steps forward, only to be greeted by a pair of glittering, ice cold eyes over the barrel of a Sig Sauer. He has a split second in which he thinks to himself _This woman is exquisite_ before his automatic reflexes kick in and he raises his gun.

He hears the gunshot as though it is something that has happened somewhere else.

He does not feel the impact as the bullet pierces the center of his forehead and passes through his brain.

He does not feel it when he crumples backward and hits the floor.

His last thought is that Ziva's pitch when she hears about this is likely to be higher than it has been since she was five and he pushed her down in a mud puddle and got her dress filthy.

xxx

_Author's note: I do not ordinarily post my stories to this site, as a great deal of my work is rated MA/NC17. If you would like to read more of my work, please feel free to visit me at xdawnfirex-fic (dot) livejournal (dot) com._

_I appreciate any and all feedback._


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